[Publicwhip-playing] Re: [geo-discuss] Re: [Openstreetmap] Coders needed for similar project & UK FOI act request update.

[Daniel Haran]

Neat. My FOI request cost me CAD$25, as did the appeal- and they can
tack on costs to this for work they do if they feel like it. Of
course, as you mention, the cost is mainly determined by the type of
data and how they decide to redistribute it.

Your point about a web service is an excellent one, imo. There's a set
of postal data here that sells for CAD$3,000, with very large
royalties. It turns out that under their rules a web service is akin
to a "service bureau", and wouldn't have to pay up to $10/$15,000 for
redistribution. Of course if you wanted to map those boundarylines on
the web it would be trivial to brute force.

It seems to me that a practical extension of a geocoder would be to
take an address and boundary type as input, and return the lat/long as
well as the boundary name that contains it. That only covers one
use-case, but that's probably the most common one.

On 11/12/05, Jo Walsh <jo at frot.org> wrote:
> Just being able to play with BoundaryLine, explore it would be
> interesting to me. Perhaps in order to avoid distributing the data one
> could build a http application which uses the data, and distribute the
> application, or, I wonder if one could do an AJAX type thing where a
> script is pointed at a local copy of BoundaryLine and the data never
> technically leaves the client machine. Whether that's pushing it a bit
> far.
>
>
> -jo
>